How to stop the blank page after leaving a comment in WordPress?

After resolving the scheduling bug in WordPress 2.9, I noticed that I was getting sent to a blank page after leaving a comment here. The comment would post but you had to hit the back button and then reload to find this out. I tried a few things the other day but put it to the back of my head until Rob Starr reminded me about the problem tonight.

Here’s the problem. After leaving a comment you are sent to http://www.bloggingtips.com/wp-comments-post.php, which is a blank page. If you go back a page and reload then you should see your comment but that page should be redirecting you back to the blog post with your comment on it.

I’ve only had this problem after updating to WordPress 2.9. However, it’s clear from reading the WordPress support forums that this is a problem that many people have had for a year or so. My hope was for this article to be an explanation of how you can resolve this problem. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to fix it as yet.

If you have had this problem and fixed please share the process you went through to resolve it. I’m sure many readers, and myself, would be very grateful.

Here are a few steps I have taken to try and resolve this problem. Many people have reported them working for them but none have resolved the issue for me.

• Repaired the comments table via PHPMyAdmin
• Made sure my comments.php template was up to date and removed whitespace from the wp-comments-post.php template
• Disabled the Akismet Plugin (Not sure if this is necessary but a few people said it was causing the blank page for them)
• Used theme test drive to try out another theme to see if the problem was related to the comments.php code

Unfortunately, most of the threads over at WordPress are incomplete with the blogger either not getting his problem resolved, or resolving it and not coming back to explain how he fixed it.

The last thing I can think is causing this is a probllem with database memory. Though if that was the case my other blogs would probably be having this problem too and they’re not. Plus, it’s always best to exhaust all other options before going to your host for help as they can’t be expected to resolve script issues like this.

I do apologise for any inconvenience caused by commentating at the moment. You can leave a comment but you will probably just get sent to that white page so please make sure you hit your back button after submitting your comment.

Again, any feedback on fixing this error would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

Written by Kevin Muldoon from WordPress Mods
Posted on January 5th, 2010 and filed under WordPress Coding & Design
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